Google has long been a supporter of open source development and
technologies.

It's now going a step further by offering the open source
community a new home to develop, manage and host projects. The site could
prove to be the biggest challenge yet for the current goliath of the open
source project hosting world: SourceForge.net.

The new site (http://code.google.com/hosting) has version control management
powered by the Subversion version control system and offers project
workspaces, mailing lists via group.google.com and issue tracking.

New projects will start off with a 100 MB quota of hosting space at Google.
The projects won't appear in Google's main Web Search, at least not right
away. It's expected to appear in Google's main index in the future.

Though the Google Code hosting service is intended for open source projects,
the Google Code hosting service is not entirely open source. Though
Subversion is open source, the issue tracker used for the service is written
by Google and apparently not open source according to information in
Google's FAQ on the new service.

However, members of the SVN community are giving the rollout a thumbs-up.

"It's long been our goal as the founding sponsor of the Subversion project,
to build a vibrant developer community around the project, beyond the
leaders we directly employ," Brian Behlendorf, CTO of CollabNet, said in a
statement. "Having Google join that community helps everyone further the
goals we have for Subversion."

Google is currently sponsoring some 630 projects as part
of its 2006 Summer
of Code initiative . Projects from that effort may show up on the Google Code hosting service as well.

"Both are part of our larger initiative to support and encourage the
development of open source software," Google's FAQ page said. "One of our goals
is to encourage healthy, productive open source communities. Developers can
always benefit from more choices in project hosting."